Friday, 27 April 2012

Bill Gates and Me

Bill Gates and I share a momentous time in the 1970s but our paths have
diverged somewhat since then. At that time, there were computers of course but they were
large and heavy and spoke a variety of different languages: Some sat on desktops but
they were still large and heavy. You will probably think that I'm going to say
that this period marked the arrival of the personal computer but that came
later, in 1981. What changed the world was the microprocessor which first
arrived in a very simple form in the early 70s.

I clearly remember being at the Sotheby's Sale Room in London watching
and waiting while an IBM desktop computer whirred and clunked as it loaded its
programme from a tape cartridge. (You can just see it bottom-left in the photo). The computer was being programmed to calculate
prices in various currencies as the bidding went up in Pounds Sterling. I was
there because I'd designed and built a large (and very heavy) display which hung above the auctioneer, it
connected to the computer and displayed the foreign currencies for all to see.
I had used small mains-powered bulbs to make up the numbers and I had painted
reflective paint around each bulb to prevent light from spilling onto other
unlit bulbs. Unfortunately, this increased the temperature inside the bulbs and
they started burning out. In the end I had to buy a variac (transformer) to reduce the
mains voltage to the display. I'm not sure how Sotheby's heard about me, they
didn't do a search in Google, that's for sure.

I looked up an old colour slide of the display and was staggered to see a piece of Veroboard (prototype board) in there. You can see it next to "Pounds Sterling". The crudity and complexity of the manufacturing was incredible! I can't believe I built that thing, it's like another world.

Another large display that I built was destined for Nigeria, in fact I
went there to install it. Again, another company had written a programme on a
computer, a PDP-11 (remember, this was the beginning of the 70s so there were no PCs).
The project was a lottery for the state of Ilorin but tickets, previously using
books of tickets, were sold throughout Nigeria so it was quite big. The main prize was usually a
car. I was with the software designer in Nigeria when an awful penny dropped.
Books of tickets, with their stubs, ensure that only numbers sold go into the
draw. But the software didn't take account of that, it simply chose a 6 digit
number at random and there was no guarantee that the number had been sold.
Oops! Well, I was in the clear, I was only the messenger. I think the whole
system ended up in the Atlantic.

So, at this time, at the beginning of the 70s, IBM was making computers
(together with many other manufacturers, of course) and I was designing and
building electronic devices, having aborted a career with the BBC as a sound
engineer in TV. My products were digital (in other words, controlling or
displaying things) as opposed to analogue products such as audio amplifiers.
They usually comprised many logic chips - building blocks - mounted on a
circuit board. If, on testing the product, I found a mistake, it would be
"back to the drawing board" and I would have to re-solder components
or cut tracks on the circuit board. It would be wrong to say that the
microprocessor changed all that; it still involved lots of chips on a circuit
board but much of the functionality was in software which could be changed
without hacking up the circuit board. But what happened in these traditional designs, before the microprocessor, was
that everything happened more or less at the same time in various chip
neighbourhoods on the circuit board. Then, in 1971, a very simple
microprocessor arrived on the scene.
Intel produced the 4004, a 4-bit processor followed by the 8080, 8086,
80286 and now we have all singing dancing, dual core processors but they are
still based on the original Intel architecture. Forgive me if I get rather
dewy-eyed. For an electronics engineer of this epoque, these are magic
numbers.

I could see the possibilities fairly quickly but I couldn't get my head
round this new way of doing things. I pored over the Intel documents but I
could see no way in. At the same time as Intel produced its first 8-bit
processor, Motorola had produced their own, the 6800, with a
completely different architecture and they sold it in a "bubble pack"
kit with one or two other support chips. I soldered it all together, pressed
Reset, and the terminal printed an asterisk! By the way, at this time, I was
using a mechanical teletype machine with a punched-tape reader. It hardly seems
credible in these modern days but I was there.

(the photo shows the "computer" that I designed around the Motorola 6800 microprocessor, with 8 inch floppy disk!)

So where does Bill Gates fit into the picture? I guess he is a fair bit
younger than I am and he would have been a student during the later 70s. To me,
his great success was not so much technical as political in that he managed to
persuade various developers, all of whom had their own pet projects, to create a common
effort (this is rather an imperfect way of describing how it happened). During
the latter part of the 70s, the microprocessor had spawned many personal
computers which no longer exist (with the exception of one, Apple,
which pre-dated the PC). Bill Gates persuaded IBM to use his operating system,
MSDOS, in their new personal computer and Microsoft was born. As we all know,
MSDOS grew into Windows and all personal computers, at least in the early days,
used MSDOS. I know it's a bit daft comparing my career with that of Bill Gates
but I feel an affinity with him because I remember those formative years so
well. And it was very exciting because, even then, one could see the
possibilities. Anyway, I continued in electronic design as opposed to computer
design but both used the same device: the microprocessor. Later came the microcontroller
which had loads of legs which one could waggle up and down in order to control
external devices. By the late 70s, I was producing what is called BMS, building
management systems. This is a general term meaning control and monitoring of
heating, air conditioning etc. My systems went into several large shopping
centres.

Microsoft comes into a lot of flak on the grounds of monopolising the
market much of which I feel is unjustified.
Had Bill Gates not cornered the market by getting MSDOS and Windows as
the default operating system for the PC, we would now have a plethora of
different operating systems all talking different languages. A similar
situation occurred several years later when Tim Berners-Lee, an Englishman working
at CERN, banged heads together to persuade developers to abandon their pet
projects in favour of a common language for the World Wide Web: HTML. Before
that, the Internet existed but it was a network of computers all talking
different languages, initially government establishments and, later, colleges in
the USA. To define the Internet and WWW: the Internet, in my view, is the
network of cables and wireless links which (amazingly to my mind) circle the
earth. The WWW is the community that resides in the Internet. And Tim
Berners-Lee still works in the constant development of the web which has to
move with every new development that comes along, not the least of which is
mobile computing.

I continued to use Motorola microcontrollers in my products right up to
2003 when I retired. My company gradually lost its clients due to the fact that
regulations were tightening up regarding products for buildings, especially fire
alarms, and they could no longer deal with a one-man-band. Incredible as it
seems now, my BMS system not only controlled the lighting in the Al Ghurair
Shopping Centre but it was the fire alarm system. And I still slept at night,
possibly through naivety at what might happen if it failed.

I must mention one thing before I close. At one time in the 80s, I had
systems installed in various centres in the Middle East and I could phone them
and update the software or diagnose problems. I used to tell friends that I
could turn off the fountains in the Al Ghurair Centre from my office in the UK.
How did I do this? Spyware! Yes, effectively. I was using a remote control
programme called Carbon Copy - perfectly legal. I installed the Host software
in the remote PC (this is what is uploaded illegally when one's computer is
infected) and the Guest software ran on my PC back in the UK. I could go into
the PC in Dubai and fiddle around with it, delete files etc. Sounds familiar?
And this was before the WWW; it was simply on a telephone link.

Now, living in Catalonia, I use my PC a lot. It gets switched on even
before I have my breakfast and it's the last thing that goes to sleep before I
do. I use all the regular programmes, Word, Excel and some which are orientated
towards art, Illustrator and Photoshop. I use Dreamweaver for web design. It's
all backed up but I don't relish the thought of re-installing everything if my
hard drive packs up. It's all come a long way since the 4004 and I've been
fortunate to have lived through such an exciting time. I guess younger people
these days take technological marvels for granted but, for one who remembers film
arriving from America on a 707 (no other way), I will always be in awe of how
much has changed and will also thank the pioneers who helped make it happen.

E&OE! I wrote this piece primarily to recount my own story rather than present an accurate history of the microprocessor and the personal computer so my apologies for any inaccuracies - I'm afraid I didn't do many hours of research in Wikipedia! If you want an accurate history of the period, then that's the place to look.

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About Me

I live in Celrà which is just to the north of Girona in Catalunya. I retired in 2005 and, after a career in electronics and sound in TV broadcasting, I now paint - have a look at my website! I love it here, I have loads of friends, both Spanish/Catalan and English-speaking. More than I had in the UK! See also www.gironagrapevine.es which I administer.